


Isaura's Gods

by yhlee (etothey)



Category: Le città invisibili | Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
Genre: Gen, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-15
Updated: 2013-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-04 16:33:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1083209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/pseuds/yhlee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Triptych: three views of Isaura's gods.  Among other things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Isaura's Gods

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Senri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senri/gifts).



In Isaura, city of the thousand wells, a girl sits on a rooftop. There are many roofs like it in the city, but only this one is hers. She looks up at the sky. No stars return her gaze, not tonight, nor the moon, although she smiles a little, thinking of them anyway. Clouds hang low over the city, like folds of mourning or meditation or interwoven melodies.

The girl worships the gods of the high places. She is waiting not for rain— _the city moves upwards, always upwards_ , she has known the song-chant since the days her mother crooned it to her in the cradle—but for the absence of rain. The affirmation that the lake is ever in the process of funneling up the chains of heat and sun and evaporative devotion into the arc of sky. This is her prayer-practice.

And these are the prayers she says as her lids lower, as the cool night air kisses its way beneath the folds of her robes, the brim of her hat.

In spite of her best intentions, she falls asleep on the roof. It's not a day for successful prayers. (Isaura experiences its share of precipitation. Weather forecasting is more than unusually important here: the signs of wheeling birds, the thumbprints of low pressure systems, the on-off cries of crickets.) The rain falls down, gently at first, then with increasing insistence.

The girl's mother hobbles up to the roof—she injured her ankle in years past, and the injury remains with her still— and carefully makes her way to the sleeping girl. She shakes her daughter's shoulder. "Come have tea," she says. She herself is a worshipper of the gods of the low places, even though she taught both the high and the low chants, the way many mothers do in Isaura. But that's no reason to sit by and let her daughter catch pneumonia.

The girl has on one previous occasion slept through the first half-hour of a deluge, when her mother was out on an errand. (With a heavy-duty lavender umbrella, because the mother reads the forecasts for practical rather than religious reasons.) The girl wishes her mother would stop reminding her of the incident now that she is all of thirteen years old and she is practically an adult. Her mother merely smiles.

"I will have to meditate to the steam rising from the cup," the girl mentions as she makes her way down the hatch in the roof.

Her mother, holding the umbrella over her, says placidly, "Of course." It's why she brews the tea in the first place, rich with cardamom and just a touch of butter and sweet, but not too sweet.

* * *

In the streets, the woman of the wells worships the gods of the low places. She has long hair, very long, which she wears in ten uneven braids tied up with ribbons that used to be beautiful, and are now frayed at the edges. From a certain point of view, they are more beautiful now, the way her hands with their brown spots and twisting veins have become embellished with age; the curled strands and faded colors possess a certain autumn dignity.

During the dry season she makes her rounds from well to well, in a pattern like a cat's cradle upon the gods' upwards tendrils. She brings with her the gossip of the wells, and the good wishes of one household to another. It is primarily although not exclusively women who go with their handcrafted, carven buckets to draw the water. Most of them know her name; all of them know her face. They talk about the small and essential things: the best places to buy bulghur, remedies for gout, the beauty of the latest sand-paintings and any spiritual insights to be derived from the masterpieces of the prophet-artists. They talk about the old coins that sometimes turn up in the streets, stamped with the faces of conquerors themselves conquered by time and indifference, and the star-crowned queens and kings who the commissioned histories, statues, symphonies that still remain in forms sometimes whole and sometimes fragmentary.

And then, after she has visited all the wells she will visit in a given day, the woman stops for the evening and visits one more, at the lipped stones where it kisses the open air, and sings down the darkness to the gods of the low places. It is not that her voice is beautiful, but that it is honest; that its echoes down to the lightless waters make uncanny harmonies. There are people who believe that everything she has ever sung to the gods is still echoing through the waters of the subterranean lake, performing patterns that only they will ever know. Even those who don't hold that particular belief will linger by their windows, or in the streets, listening to that age-hoarse, honest voice descend, and descend, and descend.

* * *

The murdered woman is neither above nor below. Her bones have been caught on the side of the hole for longer than anyone can, or does, remember; indeed, no one knows she is there anymore. She was eaten by the ants and the jackals long ago, very long ago, in the old days when Isaura was still investigating the limits of the subterranean lake, before they realized that the lake's boundary was as large as their willingness to dig. Her murderers attempted to lose her corpse in the sands, but the sands would not take her, for she was a true daughter of Isaura. Unnerved, they took the bones and weighted them and cast them down a well, then fled before waiting to hear the splash. Meanwhile her sisters and her mother and her aunts, her grandmothers, all of them searched for her and never found her.

But the gods of the high places and the gods of the low places heard the prayer written into her marrow. In her last moments she was struck silent, but gods listen with more than ears. The gods' voices howled out of the wells, hummed from the pulleys; their calls drove the murderers stumbling out of Isaura, even into a sandstorm.

Isaura's gods cradled the murdered woman's bones close, and promised her the endless lullaby of water. So far they have kept their promise.

As for the gods of the sands, well. The gods of the sands are much less sentimental about these things. They were happy to scour the murderers and take their bones for themselves, and that was that.


End file.
